The other day someone shared a post showing a list of the various states (and overseas territories) of the United States of America, ranked in order of population, highest to lowest. I find this sort of thing fascinating. I found out that I currently live in the fourth most populous state – Florida. Fair enough.

Being Canadian, I naturally wondered what this sort of ranking might look like for the Canadian provinces and territories. I already knew that my home province (Ontario) and the province where I was born (Quebec) topped the list in that order – but what I didn’t know was by how much. My Calgary and Vancouver friends often mention their frustration that people from Toronto (like myself) feel that Toronto is the center of Canada, if not the universe, but check it out – Ontario is home to almost 40% of Canada’s population.

The natural progression from this point was for me to start comparing American states and Canadian provinces. Where do those Canadian provinces slot into that big list of American states? So I made a chart to check it out.

Here’s what I found, with American states in black and Canadian provinces in blue:

Some points of interest:

The 2011 census estimated that the population of all of Canada in July of 2013 would be 33,476,688. This means that there are more people living in California than in all of Canada. How crazy is that? And Texas isn’t too far behind.

Out of all provinces and states, Canada has the bottom five in terms of population. That’s five provinces and territories with fewer people than Vermont, Wyoming, or even the District of Columbia.

Aside from Ontario and Quebec, most Canadian provinces and territories are well down the list. I didn’t realize that British Columbia has fewer people than South Carolina? That doesn’t seem to make sense to me. And if you add up the populations of both British Columbia and Alberta – home to largish cities such as Vancouver, Calgary, and Edmonton – that still doesn’t equal the population of North Carolina or Michigan?